Question about your anti-piracy scheme and downloading the game

from Stardock Forums
Will my serial number will get canned if I try to download GalCiv from a friend's DSL on another ISP/IP address that is different from the one that I registered on? Just a yes or no question will suffice.
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
I doubt SD would block you for that. However, if I would have designed it, I'd record the IP's for future references.

~SDC~
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
I was just wanting to avoid the hassle of trying to recover it should it happen. I have a 56k dialup and wanted to use a friend's higher bandwidth connection. So will it happen? Who may I ask for confirmation, if I may?

Recording the IP is a good idea to keep out the casual, but the determined can just spoof it can't they? In that case a key would be made up of the serial number plus the IP address associated with it.

Thanks for the help.
Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
I would have to imagine that downloading from different IPs would be fine. Dial-up users are almost always going to get a new IP address.

I'm guessing what they'll be looking for is downloads for the same serial number from multiple IPs addresses within a short period of time. That would indicate that it's been spread on the net.

It likely wouldn't catch people who give the serial to a friend or two over the course of a couple months.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Sidesteppingsuperman, you CAN download it from you'r friends machine - SDC does log IP adresses though, for further reference...

/Flemming
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
I think the way Brad put it was along the lines of "if we start seeing 5 downloads in a day with the same serial, we'd pull the plug".
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Basically one of the things it looks for is if a serial number is downloading the game twice at the same time from two different IPs. So if someone were to post their serial number on a warez site or NG, it would likely get disabled automatically pretty quickly.

One thing to bear in mind, the system we're using has been in place on Object Desktop since 1999. There are all sorts of theoretical possible problems one might have but in reality, it works really really well and finding an ODNT serial number on the net (that works) is virtually impossible.

~SDC~